While a crowd of 400 sang “Amazing Grace” at a Veterans Day ceremony five burial lawns to the west, Jon Bridgman and Dan Rios planned how they would pay respect to their fallen comrades in a different way.

The two veterans of the Vietnam War mapped a quest through Fort Logan National Cemetery’s nearly 100,000 graves for the headstones of six lost friends and family members from World War II and Vietnam.

Normally they wouldn’t have gone on a busy holiday, but Bridgman and Rios decided to risk it Monday and went to the southwest Denver cemetery together after brunch.

They were among those who crunched their way through 214 acres of orange leaves for a glance at the pristine, white marble or granite reminders of their loved ones’ military service to the United States.

“It’s definitely a day to reflect,” Bridgman said. “The only time I worked on Veterans Day was when I was in the service, all the way back to ’68.”

One man sipped a can of beer while he walked the rows of headstones at Fort Logan. A small American flag stuck out of his back pocket.

“Let’s do this one first,” Bridgman said, stepping up to the grave of Robert Milligan, an emissions storage officer he knew from Vietnam.

Rios followed his friend and neighbor to two other plots, including Bridgman’s “second father,” Air Force veteran Daniel Hinkle, and co-worker at Buckley Air Force Base, Alonzo Witherspoon.

Witherspoon, a mentor at Colorado Golden Gloves boxing gym, church deacon and fellow weaponry serviceman at Buckley, was shot to death in Denver in 2000.

“It seems like just the other day, especially his passing,” Bridgman said.

Rios was the fifth man in his family to join the Navy and visited three family graves at Logan, including his uncle’s war bride. He spent 1966-70 directing ships as a radarman.

“I wish more of them were here,” Rios said of his fallen family members and comrades from Vietnam. “Then again, no I don’t.”

On Monday, when the first cross-country eclipse in 99 years swoops across America, believers of all faiths will have their first chance in decades to put their particular religion’s eclipse traditions into practice.

A White House advisory council on infrastructure Thursday became the latest casualty of the pique of business leaders over President Donald Trump’s response to the hate-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The first solar eclipse to cross the continental United States in nearly a century comes at an especially inopportune time for many employers. From 10:15 a.m. Pacific until just before 3 p.m. Eastern time — some of the busiest hours of the workweek — the moon’s shadow will hit land in Newport, Ore. and leave the continent near Charleston, S.C.